White Boy Blues

After a traumatic childhood in rural Missouri, Ned Pentecost becomes a young minister with a wife and a safe future. But his life is upended in 1969 when he is exposed to free love and illegal drugs and heeds the call of the counterculture.

Ned is soon entangled in drug deals, steamy affairs, untimely deaths, and painful betrayals, a web that takes him from communes to seedy motels, from Bogot to Paris, and from classrooms to jail cells. Women loom large throughout the journey-good women, bad women, dangerous women.

Anchored in the tumultuous decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the coming-of-age novel explores themes of violence, betrayal, and redemption, while Ned undergoes numerous transformations in his search for love and purpose. In the end, Ned's story, like a good blues song, ultimately strikes a chord of hope.